This paper is reproduced with the kind permission of Dr. Helen T. Madden

From the Historical Collection of the work of Dr. Clare W. Graves
- presentations, papers, recorded transcripts, notes -
William R. Lee                                                                                         April 2001
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THE CONGRUENT MANAGEMENT STRATEGY

 By Clare W. Graves
Helen T. Madden
Lynn P. Madden

Dr. Clare W. Graves is Professor of Psychology at Union College. His background includes work in criminal psychology, child psychology, psychopathology, and industrial applications of personality theory. Dr. Graves has successfully applied his Level of Existence theory in aiding organizations from both the public and private sector. 

Dr. Helen T. Madden is Executive Vice President of Madden, Madden and Associates. She is responsible for providing consulting services to government and industry in the areas of planning, project management, productivity, and management development. Formally she developed new business strategies and analysis techniques for use in business planning for International Business Machines.

Mr. Lynn P. Madden is President of Madden, Madden and Associates and responsible for consulting activities in the areas of organizational development and systems analysis. He has successfully applies the concepts, presented in this paper, in several organizations. At the present time he is refining various tools to help facilitate the implementation of these concepts in organizations and conducting numerous management seminars for government and industry. Mr. Maddens’ previous experience includes work in computer memory engineering at International Business Machines and teaching at Union College’s graduate division.

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            For many years managers and organizations have invested heavily to find the “best” way to lead, motivate, and manage. What has been the return on investment? In many cases it has been confusion, contradiction, frustration, and no definitive results. In fact, situation after situation can be shown where the same managerial style gave diagrametrically opposed results. The poor, often disastrous results were explained away by advocates of the particular style as being due to inept application. An excuse the manager and organization found hard to accept in light of very real experience and intuition. What is there in this conceptual turbulence that the manager or organization should listen to? What should be ignored?

            It is in full appreciation of all that has gone before that we offer a management strategy that will clear away the confusion and apparent conflicts over what is and is not an appropriate managerial style. The ideas on managerial style contained in this article are one applied aspect or a much broader theory of “levels of psychological existence” [1, 2, 3]. Various articles and papers have presented an application of this theory to personnel strategies from the total organizational viewpoint [4, 5, 6].

            The basis of this theory is that people are different; that people are motivated by different stimuli, and that there is a pattern to these differences. We present a common sense management approach called the Congruent Management Strategy. In addition, we hope to show that the skepticism with which the practicing manager greeted purveyors of the claimed “only appropriate” managerial style was well warranted.

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